When my parental leave began last month, one of the perks I had to give up was my company-paid iPhone 4.

I’d grown to love my iPhone but with our home finances pretty tight, I wasn’t about to blow a bunch of cash buying my own and then paying $50 or more a month or more for a voice and data plan to keep it operating.

I’ve had friends with iPhones tell me they spend as much as $90 a month on their voice and data plans. That’s more than $1,000 a year — a fair chunk of cash.

These days, my regular cellphone, instead of a snazzy iPhone, is a dirt-cheap pay-as-you-go flip phone from Telus with virtually zero features except for a camera that takes pictures so grainy they look like abstract artwork.

But when I’m out and about with the kids, the cellphone isn’t the only gadget in my pocket. I’ve also got my trusty iPod Touch — which can do almost everything an iPhone can do except make phone calls.

The downside of the iPod Touch, of course, is that it can only get on the Internet when you’re in a WiFi hotspot. You can’t jump on the net whenever you want, like you can with an iPhone.

But I’ve noticed that, in the last couple of years, being limited to WiFi only isn’t nearly as big of a hassle as it used to be.

You can get free WiFi at the library, at Vancouver airport and on BC Ferries. And many places are making getting on WiFi a lot easier than it used to be. Starbucks use to force you to enter your Starbucks card and PIN every time you want to get online. Now you just have to click that you agree with their terms and you’re online (something, by the way, you can usually do from outside the store).

In short, almost every time I’ve felt the need to get online, I can find an free WiFi connection to jump onto, or can walk a couple blocks to find a Starbucks or McDonald’s.

What this means is that you can have almost all the benefits of a smartphone without having to actually pay for one.

You can buy an iPod Touch for $199, about the same as an iPhone without a contract. But once you have your iPod, you don’t have to pay any ongoing monthly data fees, unlike with an iPhone.

The only ongoing cost our family pays is the $10 a month it takes to keep the minutes on our pay-as-you-go phone rolling over.

That ten bucks only pays for about 40 minutes of talk time a month. But it’s amazing how rarely we go over that. Knowing that I’m paying for every minute I use on my flip phone, I don’t use it for idle chit chat. It’s just a quick way to make sure the wife can get in touch with me when I’m out and about, or to let someone know if I’m running late.

So far, I’m finding that having a “Dumb Phone + iPod Touch” is almost as good as having a much more costly iPhone. Most of what I want to do on an iPhone — play Angry Birds, read a Kindle ebook, check email — I can do on my iPod. And a lot of that I can do offline — including responding to emails (which send when I’m back online). And I’ve still got a phone in my pocket so folks can reach me anywhere at any time.

Having a Dumb Phone and iPod isn’t quite as good as an iPhone, of course. The biggest drawback I’ve found is driving directions — finding free WiFi when you’re in your car is nearly impossible and there isn’t an easy way to save a map for future offline use. And there is the odd time that I want to do something online and can’t find free WiFi anywhere (Granville Island being the most notable example). UPDATE: My colleague Craig McInnes also points out that the iPod Touch, unlike the iPhone, doesn’t have GPS. That’s true, though the Touch’s WiFi-based geolocation is still halfway decent when you’re online.

Whether a “Dumb Phone + iPod” will work for you probably comes down to how important it is to you to be connected all the time.

If it’s essential for you to be able to check your email, or update Twitter, at any moment, you’re probably best to have an iPhone or BlackBerry.

But if you can wait a few minutes to get online until you next pass a Starbucks, and only need a cellphone for people to reach you in an emergency, you probably don’t need to be shelling out anywhere from $600 to $1,000 a year for the convenience of a smartphone.

What about you? Do you love your iPhone and think an iPod Touch could never replace it? Post a comment below and let me know.

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